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Fruits of Victory: The Woman's Land Army of America in the Great War. By Elaine F. Weiss. (Dulles: Potomac, 2008. xii, 315 pp. $29.95, isbn 978-1-59797-273-4.)
Like other conflicts, World War I produced ruptures in society that temporarily allowed women to occupy nontraditional roles. In Fruits of Victory, the journalist Elaine F. Weiss chronicles the Woman's Land Army (wla), which in 1917 and 1918 mobilized twenty thousand American women in forty-two states to replace male agricultural workers.
Although the wla became a national phenomenon, its roots and heart were in the northeastern United States. The idea of using women's labor to help produce the national food supply began with proponents of Americas entry into the war. Heavily influenced by English women's experiences, the idea spread quickly through women's clubs and the Seven Sisters colleges. In 1917 private organizations, from suffragist...